MY LEAVING CERT:No matter what happens in the exam hall, you can still get to where you want to go, writes  SEÁN MONCRIEFF

IN MY experience of education I have learned more from failure than from success.

When I did the Leaving the first time around in Garbally College in Ballinasloe, everyone told me I would get an A in English. I wanted to study journalism in the College of Commerce in Rathmines, and an honour in English was essential. I wasn’t too worried. I should have been.

Because I was so relaxed about the whole business I failed to prepare at all and ended up with a D in English, my best subject. Also, I was only 16 at the time and I couldn’t really figure out what I was going to do the next day, never mind for the rest of my life.

There were aspects of the English course that didn't help either. The novel that year, Henry James's The Portrait of a Ladywas so boring that the teacher offered us money to read it. Some of the Shakespeare has stayed with me though, years later it pops into my head. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a particular favourite too.

I went back to repeat the Leaving at Garbally, this time as a boarder. I suppose the idea was to focus my mind on the job. However, boarding didn’t agree with me. I had done the Leaving once and in my mind I wasn’t a schoolboy anymore, I was a grownup. So I did grown up things like coming home to the school drunk at night. That didn’t go down very well and I got kicked out.

Nonetheless, I did the exams the second time and got what I needed for the College of Commerce, well, enough to qualify to take a raft of interviews for the course anyway. I wasn’t there yet.

We moved from Ballinasloe to Castlebar after the exams and I took a job in a factory, cleaning the toilets. I can tell you that focused my mind a bit. I think it should be compulsory for every sixth year to spend a month cleaning toilets before the Leaving Cert. It’s very motivating when you think about where you might end up.

The interview process for Rathmines was pretty rigorous and because of a postal strike and an administrative mistake that summer, I spent several days believing I had failed to get through. Phones were a bit of a luxury in 1979 so it wasn’t that easy to get the information you needed when the postman stopped calling. I had an almighty row with my mother about it on a Thursday, went off to live with my sister on a Friday, but by Monday was living in a bedsit in Rathmines.

The bedsit was horrendous, so within a few weeks I had moved into a house in Terenure with four other students, including Vincent Woods. We went to college the odd time, but not terribly often. By the end of first year I had failed all my exams and dropped out of Rathmines.

I still knew I wanted to be a journalist so I just got going on that plan, and started to write as a freelancer. I learned a lot on the job and soon realised that very few of my fellow journalists had qualifications anyway. When I started earning enough money to go and do something useless and enjoyable, I got a degree in English and philosophy by night.

Now I’m not recommending that anyone heads into the exams this week with a mission to fail, but I have learned more from failure than from success in my career so far.

When you get something right, you don’t learn much for the next stage. There are, as they say, many ways to skin a cat. I failed the Leaving the first time, but it all worked out in the end. I failed college too, but I still got to where I wanted to go.

I certainly don’t remember feeling any anxiety and when I look back on my Leaving Cert; I remember Shakespeare rather than stress.

The Seán Moncrieff Show

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